This course introduces students to strategies for style writing of common practice European art music. The issues of harmonic progression, voice leading, and texture are addressed in addition to relevant compositional concepts like repetition, variation, and elaboration. The course aims to offer a creative space even within the restrictions of stylistic emulation.

From the lesson

Module Two

In this module, we expand out harmonic palette by introducing commonly found inversions of the chords used in our basic progressions. We also look at keyboard voicing. The voicing rules used for SATB are generally followed in instrumental music, but they aren’t appropriate for all textures and instrumentations. Keyboard voicing is an approach to voicing homorhythmic, homophonic harmony for keyboard. But once one knows how to do keyboard voicing, one can apply patterns to the two hands and create accompaniment parts relatively easily. We’ll even look at creating a somewhat complex arpeggiated passage similar to a texture used in one of Schubert’s Impromptus. You will see how homorhythmic texture can be a skeleton for creating other texture types. A note about the assignments: we have 2 writing assignments. Please do them in order. Assignment 2 uses the solution from Assignment 1. So, try not to look at Assignment 2 before you’ve completed Assignment 1. There is also a quiz.